My 'hack' to the standard multi-lang filter simply allows the filter to look at divs as well as spans making it a bit more flexible in terms of wrapping around content - its a simple change to just a couple of lines in the filter that add div to the search string.
You only need to install the additional plugins if you are going to use them, but it may be worth installing them on a test site and experimenting to find which method works best for you and your content developers.
We had a play around with and discussions about a few different ways of working with our bilingual content and what we wanted to achieve with it, as well as putting our existing learning technology experience into the mix, to decide on our workflow using the multilang filter. That trying out time, I think, paid dividends in the long run by making sure we were all happy with the way we decided to work.